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BCD#20

Blind Contour Drawing #20 –  “The Spanish Family”  Alice Neel, 1943

Alice Neel was born in Pennsylvania in 1900. Alice was the fourth of five children and was raised into a conservative middle-class family. Opportunities were limited for women and she remembers her mother had once said, “I don’t know what you expect to do in the world, you’re only a girl.”

After high school and while working an office job, she attended evening art classes in Philadelphia. In 1921, Neel enrolled in the Fine Art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She rejected impressionism, the popular style at the time, and instead embraced the Ashcan School of Realism.

During her school years, she met and later married Cuban artist Carlos Enriquez, son of prominent family in Havana. The couple lived between Cuba and New York, both painting and exhibiting. They had their first daughter in 1926, who died a year later of diphtheria. In 1928, Neel gave birth to their second daughter, Isabella. Enriquez returned to Havana with Isabella. While separated from her daughter and husband, Neel suffered emotional trauma and attempted suicide. She was hospitalized for almost a year. She never divorced her husband but remained separated from him and her daughter visited her periodically throughout her lifetime.

In 1932 she returned to Greenwich Village with her lover, Kenneth Doolittle. She enrolled in the Public Works Art Project and received a wage. She had a tormentous relationship with the PWAP because of her controversial style and subject matter. In a rage, Doolittle burnt more than three hundred of Neel’s drawings and watercolors and slashed more than fifty oil paintings at their apartment on Cornelia Street. Her friend, John Rothschild, helped her leave and he wanted to move in with her but she refused. Later that year, she met Jose Santiago Negron, a nightclub singer. He left his wife and child and moved in with Neel. The couple moved to the Spanish (East Harlem), a place that had a huge influence on her work.

In 1938 she exhibited 16 paintings in her first solo exhibition in New York City at Contemporary Arts. The following year she gave birth to a son and Negron left her. In 1939, she met Sam Brody, a photographer and filmmaker. They lived on and off together for two decades and had a son in 1941. Neel lived in Spanish Harlem for 20 years and raised her two boys there. She continued to paint even though she lived on public assistance.

Neel was never a member of the Communist Party but was a believer in socialism and sympathetic to many of the Communist ideals. She attended several protests at major art galleries for the treatment of minorities and the underrepresentation of female artists.

Neel persisted in being a figure painter and a portraitist during her career even though it was unpopular. During her lifetime, the New York scene was bursting with the new energy of abstraction but she remained faithful to her style and subject matter. She created a unique, expressive style of portrait painting that captured the psychology, sociology and personality of those living in New York, from friends and neighbors in Spanish Harlem to celebrities.

Her determination to continue to create work that pleased her finally paid off as she slowly started to gain recognition and awards for her work in the 1960’s. Prior to this time, she was virtually unknown and had only a handful of solo shows. However in the last two decades of her life, she had sixty. This was due not only to the strength of her work, but to the emerging Feminist Art movement that began to shine a light on the achievements of women artists.

Neel was an original, witnessing many art movements in her lifetime and refusing to follow any of them. She has been hailed one of the greatest portraitists of the last century. Her keen observation of each of her subjects reveals insights into the human condition and conveys an emotional intensity that creates an incredibly powerful body of work.

 

Born: 1900, Pennsylvania

Died: 1984, New York

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BCD#19

Blind Contour Drawing #19 – “Falling from the Sky” Tsuneko Kokubo 2013

Tsuneko Kokubo was born in Steveston B.C., in 1937, and raised in by her Grandparents during WWII in Japan. Returning to Canada in her late teens, she studied Fine Arts for four years at Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University), focusing on drawing and painting.

She has worked extensively in theatre as a performer, dancer, costume designer and continues to do so.  In 1990, she became a full-time painter, working mainly in oils and acrylics.  Her life, like many other Japanese Canadians has been filled with hardship but she chooses to focus on beauty, especially from her garden and mountain home.  She weaves bright colours, images of plants and her life memories to create beautiful and often haunting stories on canvas.

Kokubo has had numerous exhibitions, and has paintings in private collections in Canada, Europe, Japan, Mexico and the USA.

Born: 1937, Steveston, B.C. Canada

Tsuneko Kokubo’s website:  tsunekokokubo.ca

You can learn more about Japanese Canadian artists in this wonderful directory: japanesecanadianartists.com

This is a beautiful short video that was made of Kokubo (Koko) that I would recommend watching:

https://tellingthestoriesofthenikkei.wordpress.com/falling-from-the-sky-tsuneko-kokubo-koko/

I inspire to see her work in person one day and hope to be painting well into my 80’s.

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BCD#18

Blind Contour Drawing #18 – Malade by Gabriele Munter, 1917

Though not widely known, the German painter, Gabriele Münter made important contributions to the art of the twentieth century.

Münter was born to upper middle class parents in Berlin. She began to draw and play piano as a child and her family supported her love of art. She had a private tutor and took classes at the Woman’s Artist School, since women were not allowed to enroll in German Academies.

Both her parents died before she turned 21. Munter and her sister inherited a large amount of money, allowing them to live freely and independently. Since she didn’t feel challenged by her schooling, the two young women decided take a trip to the United States to visit extended family. They stayed for over two years, mainly in the state of Texas. Munter took this time for self study and there are 6 of her sketchbooks that survived that period. They depict images of people, plants and landscapes in the United States.

Returning to Germany, she enrolled in the Phalanx School of art in Munich in 1902. There she began to attend classes in still life, landscape, woodcut techniques, sculpture, and printmaking. She became romantically involved with the director of the school, Wassily Kandinsky. Their relationship lasted over 10 years.

In 1911 she formed Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) with Kandinsky. The group included Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky and Paul Klee. The Blue Rider was one of the most important German group of artists of the 20th century

They promoted the connection between visual art and music and were inspired by the work of Henri Rousseau, spiritually-based color theory, and Bavarian folk art.

Münter exhibited paintings at the Blaue Reiter exhibitions of 1911 and 1912. She shared the groups love of  intense colour and expressiveness of line but her still lifes, figures, and landscapes remained representational rather than abstract.

At the beginning of WWI, she moved all of the works done by her, Kandinsky, and the other members of the Blaue Reiter to her house, where she hid them. She was able to preserve them despite several searches of the home, the pieces were never found. On her eightieth birthday, she gave her entire collection, more than 80 oil paintings and 330 drawings, to the Städtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus in Munich.

After the war, Münter and Kandinsky went separate ways. She was inactive for a few years after their relationship ended but begain painting again in the late 1920s. Her palette changed and her focus too. She often painted portraits of women. She moved back to Germany with art historian, Johannes Eichner.

Münter’s work was exhibited in the 1960s in the U.S. for the first time and was shown at Mannheim Kunsthalle in 1961. The Gabrielle Münter and Johannes Eichner foundation was established and has become a valuable research center for Münter’s art, as well as the art that was done by Der Blaue Reiter group. Münter lived the rest of her life in Murnau, traveling back and forth to Munich. She died at her Murnau home on May 19 1962.

Throughout her 60-year artistic career she created more than 2000 paintings, several thousand drawings, water-colours, stained glass, prints and around 1200 photographs, and today she is increasingly considered to have made a striking con­tri­bution to the art of the twentieth century.

Born: February 19, 1877, Berlin, Germany
Died: May 19, 1962, Murnau am Staffelsee, Germany
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BCD#17

Blind Contour Drawing #17 “Reclining Nude Shepherdess” 1891 Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges, France into a successful middle class family. They encouraged her and her sister Edma Morisot in their interest in art. Morisot showed promise from an early age and once she settled on pursuing art, her family continued to support her career. Her father, in particular admired strong will and perseverance.

At age 20, she made friends with landscape painter of the Barbizon school, Camille Corot, who introduced her to other artists and teachers. She took up plein air techniques and enjoyed painting small pieces outdoors and eventually larger works in a studio. Morisot was first accepted in the Salon de Paris in 1864 with two landscape paintings, and she continued to show regularly in the Salon until 1874, the year of the first impressionist exhibition.

She was acquainted with Edouard Manet in 1868, and in 1874 she married Eugene Manet, Edouard’s younger brother. She convinced Manet to attempt plein air painting, and drew him into the circle of the painters who became known as the impressionists. Her husband however, never saw himself as an Impressionist. He supported his wife and brother’s careers but didn’t appreciate the new art movement.

Morisot’s favourite subject, was her daughter Julie, who was born four years after her marriage to Eugène.  Like Mary Cassatt, Morisot was associated with “feminine” art because her subject matter was usually, women, children, and domestic scenes. Morisot painted what she saw in her immediate, everyday life. As a woman in the middle class, she saw domestic interiors, holiday spots, other women, and children. Her subject matter is equivalent to her male Impressionist colleagues. Edgar Degas painted rehearsals of the ballet, horse races, and apartments. Claude Monet painted his garden, his children, and his neighbour’s haystacks. Morisot’s art was labeled feminine because she was a woman, but her style and subject matter was similar to other Impressionists.

Morisot balanced her role of wife and mother with that of artist, something she had thought earlier to been impossible because she had been taught she would have to sacrifice marriage and motherhood for her art. The Manet family lived quietly, preparing for shows, traveling, which influenced changes in her landscapes, and entertaining their artist friends including Renoir, Degas and Whistler.

The 1890’s saw another change in Morisot’s style, outlines returned to her painting and strong forms put weight in her style. She withdrew somewhat with the death of her husband in 1892, focusing on preparing for her first solo show and spending time with her daughter and nieces. Morisot died in Paris before her solo show, at age 54.  She caught influenza while nursing her ill daughter.

The sentimentality and pureness found in Morisot’s paintings, seem strange because many people describe her as ambitious and stern. Her husband said she had “only an empty shell of a heart.”  Perhaps she painted a peaceful world she wanted, but did not experience.  Although, she was a loving mother and maintained loyal relationships, her paintings were a brave and beautiful mask of happiness that hid the despair and insecurity that haunted her as a female painter forging her way in the 19th century.

Born: January 14, 1841, Bourges, Cher, France

Died: March 2, 1895, Paris, France

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BCD#16

Blind Contour Drawing #16 “Composition avec tache rouge” 1916 Maria Blanchard

María Blanchard was born in Santander in Cantabria, Spain. Her mother had an accident during her pregnancy that meant Blanchard was born with severe disabilities such as a deformation of the spine. As a result, she had a hunchback and found it very difficult to walk. She was teased heavily at school, which left her emotional scarred. However, Blanchard found painting to be a great way of escaping and expressing how she felt.

Her family was a huge influence in Blanchard’s decision to follow a career in art. Her father provided her with love and knowledge of art, and he helped to cultivate her artistic talent in drawing.

In 1903, Blanchard moved to study in Madrid where she began training with Spanish artists such as Emilio Sala and Manuel Benedito. With Sala, Blanchard learnt the precision of drawing and the expressive use of colour.

In 1909, after winning the third prize for one of her paintings at the ‘Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes,’ the Santander government decided to fund her education in the arts with a grant. With this aid, Blanchard went to study in Paris at the ‘Academie Vitti.’ While at the Academy, she discovered Cubism.

At the beginning of the WWI, Blanchard left Paris and returned to Madrid. She began teaching art in Salamanca and participated in some expositions. After the war, she returned to Paris, where she would spend the rest of her life.

In Paris, Blanchard began spending time with the many Cubist artists living there, and she was particularly good friends with the Cubist Spanish painter, Juan Gris. His influence can be seen in many of her paintings. She joined the Cubist art group and soon began developing her own style, involving bold colour that would often clash. Her paintings were very expressive and often intimidating. In the view of Jacques Lipchitz, Blanchard brought expressiveness and, above all, feeling to Cubism.

Her work attracted the attention of the most important art dealer at the time, Léonce Rosenberg. By 1919, he organized her first individual exhibition of cubist works. The following year she exhibited work in Belgium and France. In 1921, she showed work at the ‘Société des Artistes Indépendants.’ Her work was in high demand, however, due to the economic crisis following this period, many collectors stopped investing in her work. So despite her success, she became destitute. She had to rely on her friend, Frank Flausch, to support her and he did so until her death.

Blanchard’s good friend, Gris died in 1927, and the loss of this close friendship was too much for her to take. She became a recluse, even refusing to see any of her other artist friends. However, she did continue to paint.

Unfortunately, her health gradually got worse over the coming years, and at one point she contracted tuberculosis which made it impossible for her to paint. Eventually, in 1932, Blanchard died at the age of fifty-one.

Blanchard has been and continues to be one of the great unknown artists of the early 20th century. In the forties, it has been confirmed that her signature was removed from some of her work in order to add the name, Gris because of his higher market value. Art history tends to focus on Blanchard’s appearance and personal struggles with her health but recent investigation reveals that she was admired by her peers for her strong character and earned the respect of her colleagues, a difficult feat at the time, in a environment dominated by men. Curator, Maria Jose Salazar recently wrote that “her work has remained in the background in comparison with that of her avant-garde peers and friends. However, Blanchard was equal and in some cases superior to the latter, above all in her particular way of understanding and perceiving Cubism.”

 

Born: March 6, 1881 Santander, Spain
Died: April 5, 1932 Paris, France

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BCD#15

Blind Contour Drawing #15 “The Creeks” 1957 Grace Hartigan

Hartigan was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1922. Her interest in art didn’t begin until she was in her early 20’s. At 17 she fled New Jersey with her first husband Robert Jachens. The couple were headed to Alaska to homestead but turned around when they ran out of money and Hartigan discovered she was pregnant. Jachens was drafted in WWII and Hartigan lived with his parents, raising their son, Jeffrey. She worked as a mechanical draughtsman during the war. She escaped her dreary life by immersing into the world of art through books. She began taking art classes after being introduced to the work of Matisse, sparking a lifelong interest in modern art.

In 1945, she separated from her husband and moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to paint. Hartigan quickly became part of the inner circle of the Abstract Expressionists after meeting Rothko and Gottlieb.

At this time, she signed her work as George Hartigan, in honour of the 19th century women writers Georges Sand and George Eliot. She married twice in the 1940’s and both relationships ended because of the attention her work was receiving in the art world. She struggled financially and took odd jobs to support herself. In January 1948, after seeing a Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, a new passion and perspective was ignited in her work.

Hartigan pursued this new energy and spent a week with Pollock and his wife, artist Lee Krasner, at their home in the Hamptons. Pollock encouraged Hartigan to look at the work of Willem de Kooning. In particular, she appreciated de Kooning’s study of the Old Masters and how he was breaking barriers between representation and abstract. Soon after, Hartigan began inserting recognizable images into her abstract paintings, which often consisted of thick, complex geometric shapes.

This new perspective earned her a solo debut at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1951. The following year she spent making studies based on Old Master paintings and she began to incorporate more recognizable imagery from her daily life into her work. These changes isolated her from her Abstract Expressionist friends, such as Joan Mitchell, and she lost the support from critic Clement Greenberg, which devastated Hartigan.

Hartigan painted intensely coloured gestural figures, inspired by coloring books, film, canonical painting, advertising, and life around her. The infamous painting “Marilyn,” which scatters facial features such as oversized lips and sparkling teeth across the canvas, was a breakthrough for her. Breaking up Monroe’s face was new and exciting for the time, while also challenging the standard for beauty.

Hartigan’s paintings were shown in ‘12 Americans’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1956, and in ‘The New American Painting,’ which traveled to eight European cities from 1958 to 1959. She was one of few women painters to receive that level of exposure at the time. Hartigan was hailed by Life magazine as one of the best young female American painters.

In 1960, she married her fourth husband, Winston Price, a collector of modern art and an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. She moved with him to Baltimore and began teaching in the MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in 1965 and became director of the Hoffberger School of Painting. Her husband died in 1981 after an adverse reaction to a vaccine. She gave up drinking in 1983, after a failed attempt at suicide and lived until she was 86 years old.

She was a professor for 42 years and continued to paint until her death. She is well respected not only for her work but for her perseverance despite ofttimes heavy criticism.

Her distinct style has caused critics and historians to call Grace Hartigan both an Abstract Expressionist painter and a pioneer of Pop art. She was not happy however with either categorization because she believed that paintings must have content and emotion.  She has also been an admired pioneer of feminist art but disliked her paintings being judged according to gender.

Born: March 28, 1922 – Newark, New Jersey

Died: November 15, 2008 – Baltimore, Maryland

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BCD#14

Blind Contour Drawing #14 – “Holding Boots” – Annie Pootoogook 2003/04

Annie Pootoogook, was raised in Cape Dorset, an Inuit settlement located on Dorset Island at the southern tip of Baffin Island in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut. Many members of her family, including her mother and grandmother were artists.

She began her art career in her late 20’s and immediately challenged people’s perceptions of Inuit art. A natural storyteller, Pootoogook created drawings of daily life. She once said she could only draw what she had lived. This included scenes of cozy domesticity watching Dr. Phil on TV, and of cutting up raw seal on the kitchen floor. It also included domestic violence, ATM cash machines, and alcoholism, which startled those who looked to Inuit art for wholesome Northern traditions.

Pootoogook worked out of the Kinngait Studios, a co-operative that supports and buys work from artists working in Cape Dorset. At first, there was almost no interest in her work. After sending some of her early work to the co-op’s sales team in Toronto, a stern note was sent back. “‘This stuff’s never going to sell,’ they said. ‘Stop doing it.’”

However, Pootoogook gained the attention of The Feheley Art Gallery and had a small exhibition in 2003. This was her first solo exhibition and extremely important for her career. The curators at Feheley were very supportive of her and her work despite criticism.

She gained attention internationally, when she won the Sobey award in 2006 and was invited to Germany’s famous Documenta 12 art show in 2007. She showed in major shows in the following years in North America and Australia. However, away from home and living in Montreal, she succumbed to alcoholism. She returned to Cape Dorset briefly but unfortunately it didn’t last. By 2010 she was living on the streets with a panhandler, William Watt. They continued an on-and-off relationship for the remaining years of her life.

Her life with Watt was hard. They camped in parks or under bridges. She began to complain to friends and family about the way he treated her. “One morning she came up to me,” her friend Ookik Nakashook remembers, and said ‘I am tired of being kicked out. Last night he kicked me out without boots so I had to go look for boots,’ said Nakashook. “That was during the winter. And I told her, ‘Don’t put up with that.’”

She stayed with Watt even though he continued to abuse her and take any money she made from her drawings. Tragically in 2016, her body was pulled from the Rideau River on the morning of Sept. 19, a short walk from the shelter where she had been living.

Shockingly, a comment from an Ottawa officer read “And of course this has nothing to do with missing or murdered Aboriginal women … it’s not a murder case, it’s [sic] could be a suicide, she got drunk and fell in the river and drowned who knows … typically many Aboriginals have very short lifespans, talent or not.”

An internal investigation was filed and the officer was suspended. Many feel that it is a minor punishment for obvious racism against this vibrantly talented woman.

The investigation into her death has recently been reopened.

The story of Annie Pootoogook’s life was coloured by despair and tragedy, but also by extraordinary talent, positivity, strength and creativity. The troubles that weighed on her in her last years were unimaginable, yet for a long time she was able to manage them, and even to make art from them. She took her experiences, whether joyful or difficult, and made them into a body of work that changed Canadian art.

Born: May 11, 1969 – Cape Dorset (Kinngait)
Died: September 19, 2016 (aged 47), Ottawa

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BCD#13

Blind contour drawing #13 – “Judith Slaying Holofernes” – Artemisia Gentileschi 1620-21

In the last few decades, Gentileschi has been titled one of the most important Italian Baroque painters. The excellence of her work, her treatment of controversial subjects and the number of her paintings that have survived are some of the many reasons for that honour.

However, her work is still under appreciated, in the words of Mary D. Garrard, she “has suffered a scholarly neglect that is almost unthinkable for an artist of her caliber.”

She was born in Rome, her father Orazio Gentileschi was a painter and her mother, Prudentia Montone died when Gentileschi was young.

Even though she was not allowed to apprentice as a painter, her father saw her promise and trained her as an artist, eventually introducing her to the working artists of Rome. Later in life because of this introduction, she became a follower of Caravaggio and worked with him in Italy.

By the time she was seventeen, she had painted one of the works for which she is best known, her stunning interpretation of “Susanna and the Elders.” She was not allowed to attend any other form of schooling and didn’t learn to read and write until she was adult.

Gentileschi’s father painted frescos with the artist, Agostino Tassi, he asked him to teach his daughter perspective. During these lessons, Tassi raped Gentileschi. When her father found out, Tassi was arrested. At the age of 18, she was thrown into the middle of a trial that received unwanted publicity and ruined her reputation. Tassi was convicted, but released by the judge, who also ordered her to be tortured to prove she was being honest.

A month later, she married a painter from Florence named Pietro Antonio di Vicenzo Stiattesi. They relocated to Florence and had a daughter. Their relationship wasn’t a happy one, but it gave her an opportunity to flourish as an artist.

Some of Gentileschi’s surviving paintings focus on a female protagonist. The character of Judith appears a number of times in her art. In 1611, Gentileschi completed the famously gruesome “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” which shows Judith in the act of saving the Jewish people by killing Assyrian general Holofernes. Judith is slicing Holofernes’s throat while her handmaiden helps to hold him down. Many interpret this as a cathartic expression of her rage and violation.

Some time between 1626 and 1630, Gentileschi moved to Naples where she lived and painted until 1638. While there, she painted “Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting,” so unique because of its blending of art, muse and artist.

She reunited with her father in late 1638 on a joint painting commission for King Charles I of England to paint a ceiling for the Queen’s house. Sadly her father died in the following year, but she continued to work in England until 1642 and then returned to Naples.

Thirty four of her paintings survive today, as well as the near complete transcript of the rape trial, published in full in a book detailing her life. Because of the trial and her many paintings of powerful women struggling against male dominance, she was not popular with her male colleagues.

The cause and time of Artemisia’s death is not known, but she most likely died in 1652.

Several demeaning epitaphs were published about her in 1653. Art historian Charles Moffat believes she may have committed suicide, which would explain why the cause of her death was not recorded

Today, she remains an inspiration, not only for her powerful artwork, but for her ability to overcome the acts of abuse against her, her lack of education, the disrespect from her peers and the many prejudices of her time. Like most women who excelled at that time she caused mass controversy and hate. She was recognized as having genius, but she was seen as a monster because she was a woman pursuing a creative talent in a genre thought to be only for men.

Note: I was fortunate to see this work at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I could barely look at it. It is difficult to articulate the power of this masterpiece.

Born: Rome 1593
Died: 1652?

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BCD#12

Blind Contour Drawing #12 “Self Portrait with Loose Hair” 1947 – Frida Kahlo

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon has been celebrated worldwide as a symbol of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions but her work was largely over looked until the Feminist art movement of the 1970’s.

Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at her family home now known and publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. She suffered from polio as a child and nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager. Multiple fractures, a shattered pelvis, broken foot and dislocated shoulder from the accident plagued her with health issues for the rest of her life. She began to focus heavily on painting while recovering in a body cast and gave up her earlier ambitions of a higher education. She had 30 operations in her short lifetime.

In 1927, she joined the Mexican Communist Party and met muralist Diego Rivera. They married in 1928. Kahlo spent the late 1920s and early 1930s traveling in Mexico and the United States with Rivera while he was working.

During this time she developed her own style as an artist and drew her main inspiration from Mexican folk culture. She mostly painted small self-portraits. Her physical and emotional pain is depicted on canvases, as is her turbulent relationship with her husband, who she married twice. Life experience is a common theme in Kahlo’s work.

Her paintings raised the interest of Surrealist artist André Breton, who arranged for Kahlo to have her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938. The exhibition was a success and was followed by a show in Paris in 1939. The Louvre purchased a painting from Kahlo called “The Frame,” making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection.

Throughout the 1940s, Kahlo continued to show in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States. Her health began to seriously decline and shortly after her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, she died at the age of 47.

She was mainly known as Rivera’s wife until her work was “rediscovered” by art historians and political activists in the 1970’s. Since then she has become an international icon and celebrated by Mexicans, feminists and the LGBTQ movement.

By 1984, Kahlo’s reputation as an artist had grown to such extent that Mexico declared her works national cultural heritage. “Diego and I,” was auctioned by Sotheby’s for $1.4 million in 1990, the first Latin American artist to break the 1 million dollar threshold. In 2016, “Two Lovers in a Forest” sold for $8 million.

She is one of the most recognized artists in history and hopefully “Fridamania” carries with it her progressive values, strength and beauty.

Born – July 6, 1907 Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico
Died – July 13, 1954 Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico

 

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BCD#11

Blind Contour Drawing #11 – “Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science”  Women’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago – portion of a panel, since been destroyed – Mary Cassatt

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker.

She was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania in a wealthy family and grew up in a household that viewed travel as essential to education. She lived for five years in Europe and began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the age of fifteen.

Her family had many concerns including exposure to feminist ideas and the bohemian lifestyles of some of the male students. She found her education to be moving too slowly and restrictive. Female students could not use live models (until somewhat later) and the principal training was primarily drawing from casts.

Cassatt decided to end her studies without a degree with the support of her mother and at the objections of her father. In 1866, she moved to Paris, with her mother and family friends acting as chaperones.  Clearly skilled, she was accepted to study with Jean-Leon Gerome, a highly regarded teacher known for his hyper-realistic technique and his depiction of exotic subjects.

At this time, the French art scene was in a process of change, as radical artists such as Courbet and Manet tried to break away from accepted Academic tradition, the Impressionists were in their formative years.

In the summer of 1870, she returned to the states. Her father continued to resist her chosen career and paid for her basic needs, but not her art supplies. Cassatt considered giving up art, as she was determined to make an independent living.

However within months of her return to Europe in the autumn of 1871, her painting “Two Women Throwing Flowers During Carnival,” was well received in the Salon of 1872 and was purchased.

She began to attract notice in Parma and was supported and encouraged by the art community there, “All Parma is talking of Miss Cassatt and her picture, and everyone is anxious to know her”.

Cassatt admired Edgar Degas, whose pastels had made a powerful impression on her when she happened upon them in a window in 1875. “I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art,” she later recalled. “It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.”

She was invited by Degas to show paintings for the next Impressionist show. The Impressionist exhibit of 1879 was the most successful to date.

Her style had gained a new spontaneity during the two years. Previously a studio-bound artist, she had adopted the practice of carrying a sketchbook with her to record the scenes she saw, out-of-doors and in her daily life.

She became extremely proficient in the use of pastels, eventually creating many of her most important works in this medium. Degas also introduced her to copper engraving, of which he was a recognized master, which strengthened her control of line.

In recognition of her contributions to the arts, France awarded her the Legion d’honneur in 1904.

Diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism, neuralgia, and cataracts in 1911, she did not slow down, but after 1914 she was forced to stop painting as she became almost blind. Nonetheless, she took up the cause of women’s suffrage, and in 1915, she showed eighteen works in an exhibition supporting the movement.

Under the influence of Degas and many more, Cassatt revised her technique, composition, and use of colour and light, manifesting her admiration for the works of the French avant garde, she again made a specialty of the mother and child theme, which she treated with warmth and naturalness in paintings, pastels, and prints.

Born: May 22, 1844- Pennsylvania

Died: June 14, 1926- Chateau de Beaufresne